Police to arrest man in nearly 10-year-old Milford murder

Frank Juliano, Staff Writer

Published 10:40 pm, Friday, January 14, 2011

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Kelsey Monahon, who was found strangled in her Milford home on May 25, 2001. An arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez, age 50, for the murder and felony murder of Monahon. Rodriguez is currently in prison in Oklahoma. less

Kelsey Monahon, who was found strangled in her Milford home on May 25, 2001. An arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez, age 50, for the murder and felony murder of Monahon. Rodriguez is ... more

Milford Police Chief Keith Mello speaks at a press conference Friday, Jan. 14th, 2011 where he announced that an arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez in the 2001 murder of Kelsey Monahon. Mello is seen here with Kevin Lawlor, State's Attorney for the judicial district of Ansonia and Milford. less

Milford Police Chief Keith Mello speaks at a press conference Friday, Jan. 14th, 2011 where he announced that an arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez in the 2001 murder of Kelsey Monahon. ... more

An arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez, age 50, for the murder and felony murder of Kelsey Monahon, who was found strangled in her Milford home on May 25, 2001. Rodriguez is currently in prison in Oklahoma. less

An arrest warrant has been obtained for Luis Antonio Rodriguez, age 50, for the murder and felony murder of Kelsey Monahon, who was found strangled in her Milford home on May 25, 2001. Rodriguez is currently in ... more

Photo: Contributed Photo

Police to arrest man in nearly 10-year-old Milford murder

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MILFORD -- A man with a long criminal history but no obvious ties to the city has been charged with the murder of Kelsey Monahon, 28, in her beach house nearly 10 years ago.

Luis Antonio Rodriguez, 50, was charged with murder and felony murder in an arrest warrant signed Friday morning. Rodriguez has been in a federal prison in Oklahoma for the past two years on weapons charges. His last known address was in Independence, Mo., said Milford Police Chief Keith L. Mello. Connecticut law enforcement officials are making arrangements to go to Oklahoma and formally arrest Rodriguez, said State's Attorney Kevin Lawlor. When he is arraigned on the Connecticut charges his bond will be $2 million, Lawlor said.

Milford police said that Rodriguez was last arrested in Connecticut in 1989 for robbery, burglary and weapons charges, for which he was convicted and served time in prison.

Mello and Lawlor said that although Rodriguez did not have a local address on May 25, 2001, evidence developed by police and the cold case unit of the Chief State's Attorney's office places him in Milford on that day when Monahon was bound and strangled in the course of an apparent burglary.

"This was not random,'' said Mello, who was the Milford police captain in charge of the detective bureau when the crime was committed. Police apparently believed early on that the killer was a Hispanic male. People stopped at a police checkpoint at the beach over that Memorial Day weekend were asked if they'd seen a person fitting that description in the area that day.

Neither Mello nor Lawlor would comment during an afternoon press conference on reports at the time that the killing was related to a drug debt. No one has claimed the $50,000 reward offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction, Lawlor said.

Kelsey Monahon, who was pregnant, had been hog-tied and her home ransacked. There was no evidence of sexual assault, officials said Friday. She died three days later at Bridgeport Hospital. Her husband, Matt, found her on the floor, unconscious at 7:40 p.m. and began giving his wife cardiopulmonary resuscitation while he called 911.

"Please come help!'' an emergency call transcript recorded his call. "My wife is unconscious. She's on the floor ..."

"We're on our way out now,'' the dispatcher said. "We'll be there in just a couple minutes, sir. OK?"

"Well, I don't have a couple minutes," he replied. "She's unconscious. Her heart's not beating.''

He then hung up, saying he had to perform CPR. The couple had been married two years.

Friday afternoon, Matt Monahon said in a statement through his mother that "this is a happy day. I can finally exhale.''

He has not remarried, and he returned home to Victorville, Calif., to live with his mother. Matt Monahon has multiple sclerosis, a disease diagnosed shortly after he and Kelsey were married. They were building a house near the corner of Shorefront and Bittersweet Avenue in the Wildermere Beach section, and lived in a smaller house across the street.

"We knew when she came along that she was the one,'' Patricia Monahon said Friday of her daughter-in-law. "When Matt was diagnosed with MS, she called me and said `I'm here for the long term. Whatever life he has ahead of him, I'll make sure it's a good one.' ''

Patricia Monahon said she and her son were "unspeakably happy at this news."

She said, though, that the wish that she was coming home.

"I'd rather have my daughter-in-law back. But we ought to build a monument to the Milford Police Department, especially Detective Doug Youd. He was like a pit bull with a bone. He kept in touch with Matt all along,''she said.

Kelsey Monahon's mother, Joan Dunnder, had urged then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell to offer the $50,000 reward, the highest by law, and Rell agreed to do that in 2008.

Dunnder could not be reached for comment Friday. Patricia Monahon said that she and Dunnder had kept in touch for many years but haven't spoken in a long time.

Lawlor said that Charles Stango, the supervising assistant state's attorney in the Ansonia-Milford Judicial District, had presented the evidence gathered by the cold case unit and the Milford police to a one-man grand jury. That jurist, a sitting Connecticut judge, found probable cause for the charges against Rodriguez and signed the warrant.

The grand jury process is rarely used, the state's attorney said, "but we felt it was appropriate here, given the age of the case.''

Rodriguez faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole if he is convicted. The felony murder charge is lodged because the murder was committed in the course of another crime, the burglary and robbery, law enforcement officials said.